refarm

after loosing a flyght in São Paulo I’m back home now and it’s time to make a balance.
this idea os taking out the water of urine and grey waters makes sense and with the prototype we have made in serrinha we are some steps closer. its clear that the composter is a good source of heat and specially during the night where the delta of temperature gets really big. one design flaw of our prototype has placing the boiler outside the composter. we did this to keep an eye on the boiler but also was easy to build it outside the composter. making it inside would be like making a ship inside of a bottle :p but this meant that after the hot liquid enters the boiler is starts to cold and the efficiency of the model gets compromised.. we where able of distill around 50ml during one night. we still have some problems to solve but we are on a good path to help solving urban farms biggest problem: a local source of water and nutrients.

we did it!! we were selected!!! we have team up with CIMNE nature on this one and made a great proposal :)

you know, this year subject of research is water and water is one of those issues on urban farming.. getting water from the grid is expensive to everyone, the ones that pay, the ones that supply it and to all of us as a planet. at the same time in urban environment we trash a lot of water, in all colors: black, brown, grey and yellow. just by the colors you can figure their content :p but the content that gives color is just a small part of it. in all around 99% is water. on the other and we need nutrients and we are all the time trowing them out of the sink. so on this project we will focus on cleaning water and reduce nutrients to a more concentrated solution that we can apply later on the farm.

this is not nothing new of course, the plants use exactly the same technic to pump nutrients over their body.

you may have notice that we are huge fans of the interactivos program from medialabmadrid ehhehehe. I’ve enjoyed a lot the past one’s and today the calls are open again. this is not a normal interactivos, this one is in rio de janeiro:) run by the amazing nuvem team, surrounded by nature and having water and autonomy has a line of work, I think we are gonna propose something :p

we started some weeks ago preparing the materials, having workshops about composting and cartography all the local sources of organic left overs. we are lucky in this project cause we already have a restaurant (taula amiga’s cantine) that prepare meals to around 40 families. we also located 4 vegetable stores near the farm and of course we have the left overs of all the participants of this project. now let’s make compost!! :)

this sunday we’ll give a workshop in collserola national park. we’ll DIT our low budget automatic watering system in the farm of can pujades coop. if you are around barcelona area you are more then welcomed. by the way, it’s free :p

this is the second, expect one every month from now until the end of the summer :)

the picnic organic gathering organized by m.u.l.a and friends is where everything fits together. a bit like music where all the different instruments contribute to a common track.

in quirhort we have different teams that every 2 days feeds the composters and give a good turn to all. the composters are feed with neighbors organic waste and vegetables that this team gets from local shops. but before this organic waste goes to the composters, we separate what’s suitable to eat/cook/share and just then what’s left goes to hermetia illucens :)
part of this food gets frozen and is with this food that we make this amazing paellas for everyone that comes by this days and eat with us.

today the tarragona city council brought to us 4 trash containers that are broken. they are perfect for us, we cover all the bottom holes, build a wood base that holds the trash and drains the liquids, build a structure that elevates the container so we can put a tube for leaching collection and turn the composter more easily. here a link to our wiki

we plan building this farm together and with so many things to build and many more to learn we setup the goals for this next months: building a urban composting system, build the first 8 tables for the families and 2 more if there are neighbours interested in growing their vegetables :) in between we’ll learn how to grow food. we’ll meet every friday from now until the end of april. come join us if you are around ;)

today is our last day in hort del circ. the city council wants to dig the roman ruins that are under the farm so we must leave. but one finish and another starts :p we are taking all the soil and some farm structures to taula amiga’s farm.

this is a project that we have been cooking for some time now. we manage to involve 3 institutions and give some meaning to this farm. the idea is to engage neighbors and users from taula amiga social cantina to produce their own vegetables. a farm has a tool just like we see it :p

the city council gave the allotment. no water, no electricity, no direct sun. design and biology challenges are all there :)

horticulture school of reus will give us the local approach. local seeds, small workshops of calendars and farm management, organic farm procedures and will keep an “eye” over the new year.

and taula amiga: we first meet fundacio formacio i treball through another workshop in barcelona. we needed washing machines, they didn’t have but in between we made a visit to their headquarters and we meet their social cantina project called taula amiga (friendliest table. in catalan sounds better:) every one in this cantina is involved in some kind of integration/formation work and the farm is meant to them. we will start with 10 families and some neighbors the design and the construction but first and until the spring of 2016 we are having horticulture classes and start a community composting.

uau, great day today!! we took apart pallets, cut some of them on strategic places, add screws , prepare some wood wheels and you get yourself a nice farm container :) all made with recovered materials from the surroundings.

next steppes will be building some more (will be dependent of the local-analog-crowfunding-campain that we are setting up:) and then apply our automatic watering system also made with urban trash ;)

back in april we made an open call in hangar to give a workshop. it did not go through cause we didn’t had enough people, but among the people who contact us was M.U.L.A. a beautiful collective project of house sitting, a DIT project made with both human and materials from the surroundings where old buildings are recovered by the people and supported by the proprietaries. we and MULA started to talk of making a workshop on the upper town and for us is great to have a project in this part of barcelona. MULA with other local entities are promoting the use of a vacant allotment where a old clinic (quirò) was taken down. they have an agreement with the city council for 2 years. it’s 3000m2 and more or less half will be available for urban farming. since we can not use the soil we’ll built farm structures with wheels for urban mobility :) apart of building the essential structures: shadow, composers, farm structures, watering systems, a kitchen :) we’ll try to go further this time and one of the tools we will try to implement is the local cartography of raw materials to build soil. we need to select composter systems and recipes to start mapping the leftovers of restaurants, citizens and other specific ingredient to then make the schedule of collecting. some tricks we can made like for example make a dropbox only to egg shells or sea shells. you know.. not only the local gastronomy is deeply connected with different vegetables for different seasons, the compost you can make in a city is also connected like this: here people eat “tortillas” and sea food and this are excellent providers of minerals.

we are starting a local-analog-crowdfunding to this project. check here the poster duna made. we have 3 kinds of farm structures, a starting party with food included and other surprises for the supporters :p you can support this project on selected places, like pepi’s bar, where she will explain to you and in person all the great things about this initiative and if you have time you can also know a little bit more about the neighbor and the surrondings supported by honest food cooked by pepi’s husband and the espai quiro blog webmaster, antonio.

the first design-together starts next sunday. we’ll meet in espai quirò around 11h. see you there ;)

you know that we have been researching about urban soil for a while and one of the tools we have worked with is chromatography. next 7 june at the botanical garden of barcelona we will give workshops with 2 variants of this separation technique: photo chromatography for soil samples and paper chromatography for leaves pigments separation. check the program here there are plenty of great activities ;)

this year we were invited by ciclica to give 2 workshops in fescamp. today I came with xavi to give our last workshop. have you ever been here? fescamp is a annual gathering that trough collaborative artistic practices promotes a critical reflection about the city of Sant Cugat del Vallès with focus on environment and sustainability.

we had a great workshop. many people interested in watering systems and e-trash recovering.

yeah! this time you must run!! in 4 days we’ll be traveling to madrid to give a 6 day workshop and build together the medialab prado farms :) this workshop is free for you there are still a couple of available places!! run run to here :)

has been 6 years and we now return to hangar.org after studying 15 different cities, different food, different tools and different trash. it’s good to be back home with a workshop program that’s the most comprehensive we’ve done so far. we also have other plans for the other days of the week so if you want to build together your next low budget automated food table just join us if you want to collaborate on the space building or on urban composting you are more then welcome ;)

we’ve good news!! from january to june the SUFj project will development new collaborative works and social happenings for iaac’s rooftop garden. me, wen, mar and sebas will give more news soon but if you wanna join us you are more then welcome. we meet every tuesday from 10h30 > 17h~20h

on our first meeting we talked about what we need to do, what we want to build and logistic details. wen today brought 2 surprises: the companion planting diagram of the plants we already have

and since today we also celebrate that sebas will be on costa rica for 2 months wen, prepared a goodbye-see-you-soon song ;)

Good news this week; Our project “Soil, Food and the City” (“Suelo, Ciudad y Alimento“) was one of ten projects selected from around the world to be developed at the MediaLab Prado Citizen Innovation workshop to be held in Veracruz, Mexico, in November.

The objective of this project is to create a low-cost tool that we can use to evaluate the quality of soil in an urban setting. With this tool we’ll be able to map empty lots in the city which have the potential to be used to grow food, with the end goal of achieving food sovereignty and security.

To create this global picture of urban soil quality we’ll conduct various tests. These tests would be conventially divided into three ‘boxes’ or subsets of tests, each with its peculiarities and advantages. The kits consist of affordable and sufficiently qualitative tests for the assessment of soil properties in urban and peri-urban sites. The complementary nature of each test will help citizens and scientists to gain an overall understanding of soil health and processes.

So if you think you’d be interesting in helping us develop this project, or to learn more about the workshops as a whole check out the collaborators page here.